Tech Blog

I wanted to add an AD group to all the files and folders in a share, the problem is inheritance had been turned off on lots of the folders so I couldn’t just add the AD group to the top and let it filter down. So the solution was to use PowerShell.
First I mapped a drive to the Share (x: in this case). Why didn’t I run this on the server? UAC is a pain in the bum.

You’ll need to change the path and the domain and AD group.

If you need to report out file and folder permissions of a file share, see the below PowerShell.

First map the the share to a drive if it isnt already.  In my case X: drive.

Why didn’t I do this on the server hosting the files?  UAC gets in the way and is a pain the bum.

I wanted to make some changes to some permissions on mass today but decided it would be prudent to backup the permissions first.

So I used icals, to do this I first ran CMD as admin, then mapped the share drive with “Net Use“.

Why didn’t I do this on the server hosting the files?  UAC gets in the way and is a pain the bum.

To backup the permissions:

Swicthes:

/t – Performs the operation on all specified files in the current directory and its subdirectories.

/c – Continues the operation despite any file errors. Error messages will still be displayed.

Then to restore:

To resize VMs using PowerShell with PowerCLI from a csv list, first install the software:

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=PCLI650R1&productId=614

Then create a list of servers to resize and save it as a CSV file in C:\temp\VMs.csv:

Save the below as Something.PS1 and run from PowerCLI

Note: Change VCENTRE to your vCentre, this script will TURN THE SERVER OFF then give each VM two CPUs, one socket and 5GBs of RAM.

Just a quick one, to install RSAT on Windows 10 1809 via PowerShell:

then check:

Got this today while connecting to Event viewer on a remote windows 10 machine:

To Fix remotely:

How to disable Dedup:

First an important point about disabling dedup (via GUI or PowerShell), when you disable it only stops further deduplication from occurring i.e data that has already been deduplicated will remain deduplicated

If you want to “move” the data back to the original files and out of the deduplication store (Chunk Store) you need to use powershell command

You can check the status on where this is at by using

Here’s another gotcha, chunk size (love that name) will not get smaller until you run two more commands, GarbageCollection and Scrubbing.  GargabeCollection will find and remove unreferenced chunks and scrubbing will perform an integrity check but this wont work unless dedup is on….so enable dedup:

Then run garage collection:

Once your drive is small again then disable dedup:

Found a drive was running low on space today and on closer inspection with tree size I found that ChunkStore (brilliant name) was taking up the drive space:

Odd as it looks as dedup wasn’t working:

To fix it I ran the following PowerShell:

What does this do I hear you say, Garbage collection is the process to remove “data chunks” that are no longer referenced i.e. to remove references to deleted files and folders. This process deleted content to free up additional space. Data scrubbing checks integrity and validate the checksum data.

To monitor it I ran:

This seems to have fixed it for me:

My colleague Welsh Dai made this sweet bit of PowerShell to see the ratio of physical CPUs to Virtual CPUs:

Here’s a picture

Hi All,

A chap called Michael Grafnetter has created a brilliant PowerShell script to check password hashes in Active Directory against a list of simple or common passwords.

This is great to encourage users not to use obvious passwords, for example if a company is called Contoso then you’d want to encourage users not to use Contoso1 etc.

Here’s how:

Download the software:

https://github.com/MichaelGrafnetter/DSInternals/releases/tag/v2.22

Copy the DSInternals directory to your PowerShell modules directory, e.g.

Launch Windows PowerShell.
(Optional) If you copied the module to a different directory than advised in step 4, you have to manually import it using the Import-Module .\DSInternals\DSInternals.psd1 command.

Next create a text file called passwords.txt and fill it with passwords you’d like to scan for, example:

Then here’s an example script:

First set the password txt file.

Then set the Domain Contoller, in this case DC1

Then set the distinguished name of the OU and sub OUs you can to scan:

Note ” and ‘ are not showing up properly,

$dictionary = Get-Content passwords.txt | ConvertTo-NTHashDictionary Get-ADReplAccount -All -Server DC1 -NamingContext ‘dc=adatum,dc=com’ | Test-PasswordQuality -WeakPasswordHashes $dictionary -ShowPlainTextPasswords -IncludeDisabledAccounts